Most popular Valentine’s Day movies around the world

It’s February, which means that love is in the air and Cupid is on the hunt with his arrow. But perhaps chocolate and flowers aren’t your thing. Maybe you’re more Netflix-and-chill.

If your way of celebrating this season is to kick back at home watching a romantic movie with one person (or more), you may have asked yourself, “What’s a good Valentine’s Day movie?” Regardless, we have — which is why we combed through a list of 100 romantic films for Valentine’s Day and ranked them based on their popularity around the world.

Index of what’s to come

List of the top 25 Valentine’s Day films

If you’re looking to watch the most popular Valentine’s Day film, find a place to stream The Fault in Our Stars (2014), as it was the most popular movie of Valentine’s Day 2019. Closely following is Love, Rose (2014), with Titanic (1997), Me Before You (2016) and 500 Days of Summer (2009) rounding out the top five most popular Valentine’s Day films.

Most popular film in each country

You may be curious about which Valentine’s Day film piqued the highest interest in your own country. From Albania to Zimbabwe, here are the top films for 133 countries around the world.

Which countries are most into Valentine’s Day movies?

Topping the list for Valentine’s Day film search volume is Hungary, followed by Ukraine, Ireland, Australia, Serbia and Russia.

When were these films made?

Before reaching for that old classic, you might be interested to know that the most prolific year for rom-coms was 1999, with 7 of the top 100 films on our list released that year. Next up is 2007, with five films. Tied in third place with four films are 1985, 1995, 2000, 2001 and 2014.

Most films by decade

While the year with the highest peak for rom-coms was 1999, the noughties (’00s) actually produced the most films on our list, followed by the ’90s and the 2010s.

The stars of rom-coms

When you hear the word “rom-com,” what’s the first actor’s name that jumps to mind? If Hugh Grant, then you’re correct. Hugh Grant was the star in 7 of the top 100 films on the list, making him the most prolific Valentine’s Day actor. Grant starred in Notting Hill (1999), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), Two Weeks Notice (2002), Music and Lyrics (2007), Mickey Blue Eyes (1999) and Nine Months (1995).

But what about leading lady? That honor goes to Meg Ryan, who starred in five of the films on the list, including Kate & Leopold (2001), You’ve Got Mail (1998), When Harry Met Sally (1989), IQ (1994) and Sleepless in Seattle (1993).

Other notable actors with three entries on the list are Peter O’Toole, Ralph Fiennes, Julia Roberts, Vanessa Redgrave, Hugh Jackman and Diane Keaton.

Actors who appeared in more than one Valentine’s Day film

Which director’s films stir up the most Valentine’s Day interest?

If you prefer what’s going on behind the camera, then you may want to pick up something by Woody Allen, who has four films on the top 100. Those films are Magic in the Moonlight (2014), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Love and Death (1975) and Annie Hall (1977). Other directors with more than one film on the list include John Carney, Nora Ephron and William Wyler.

Directors with more than one film on the list

Methodology

• Methodology

  To narrow down our list of the top 100 Valentine’s Day films, we first looked at a list of 100 Romantic Films for Valentine’s Day on IMDB. We then searched for the title of each film in Google Trends, which returns a number of between 0 and 100 for “search interest.”

  For the location, we left it “worldwide” to return search interest for each film across 250 countries in which Google Trends may provide data. Of the 250 countries, 133 returned a result. Because we are interested only in movies people may watch for Valentine’s Day, we looked at the full month of February 2019: February 1st through the 28th.

  When searching the film title, we were sure search results with either “film” or “[Year] film” in the search prompt. Of the 100 films, 9 either returned no data for the search period or included names too general to return a result. As such, we omitted the following films from the list:

  • Creator
  • IQ
  • Ninotchka
  • Once
  • Onegin
  • Tim
  • Under the Eiffel Tower
  • When Brendan Met Trudy
  • Wimbledon

  To map our top films for each country, we used the film with the highest search interest in that country during the month of February 2019. In cases where multiple films tied as the top result, we conducted the search again with the location changed to the specific country and compared the search interest of those top results.

  To determine countries most interested in Valentine’s Day films, we looked at two metrics. First, we totaled all “search interest” figures and then ranked those countries from 1 to 133. Second, we counted the number of times a country had the top 100 “search interest” for a film and then ranked the results from 1 to 4. We then took the average of those two ranks to determine the overall scores for these countries.

  For the top film, we ran the same process as we did for countries, but we ranked the films on both the total search interest and the number of times that title returned in a result set. We then averaged the scores.

  Because Google Trends data fluctuates, this is not definitive data. (But it’s a bit of fun, so who cares?)